To be fair to the original Fable, however, it’s not as if other games succeeded where it failed. Every game that claims to present a moral quandary or offer a choice suffers from exactly the same disconnect between the main mechanics and the ‘choice’ moment. It wasn’t surprising to find out that the Little Sisters were a late addition to BioShock, and the option to spare the odd unfortunate in GTAIV trivialised the thousands of others you kill without a second thought. Games have simply never been very good at making you feel responsible for your actions: you could count on one hand those where – forgetting about the idea of morality – any choice feels like it carries a weight of responsibility. Those that do succeed often do it without any explicit prodding. Shadow of the Colossus makes the player feel bad for killing things without an NPC saying, “You’re a bad man”. The world makes you feel bad: you’re an intruder, a murderous little so-and-so who relentlessly assaults enormous, peaceful beasts in their homes.

So how do you bridge this divorce between a game’s mechanical interactions and its narrative paths? Carter and Molyneux talk about specific incidents, which we’ll avoid for the sake of the experience. But in conceptual terms what you will face in some of Fable II’s most crucial moments is a stark truth: goodness isn’t rewarded. It might be the right thing to do, but it’s often not the sensible thing to do, and your avatar’s entire character, both internally and externally, will be affected in a way that many players will find, at best, disquieting and, at worst, an outrage. And if your choices affect your character’s physical well-being, strength and abilities – and not in the tired old ‘dark path = dark powers’ way – will you be content with just the warm glow of having done something right? “The things that begin to happen to you and your final choice,” begins Louise Copley, Fable II’s executive producer, “they’re hard, hard things – but that’s the path of a hero. Do you want to be one or not?” You can lose almost everything. You can lose your hard-won experience. You can grow old and you can be permanently scarred. You’ll be bullied by other characters, and they won’t hesitate to mock the type of player you are. It’s taken a while to find expression in games, but now being good isn’t about wanting to be good and clicking the right option: it’s about self-sacrifice. “Now it’s hard,” says Carter. “So, you’re good. What if that stops you doing this? Still good? What if we take this, and this, and this from you? Still good?”

Part of why this is so effective is that, while Fable II does offer the big dramatic moments where you’ll be aware of acting in a particular way, the vast majority of the game simply consists of situations to which you react without realising they’re ‘choices’. In short, Fable II comes scarily close to building your character based on your behaviour rather than your conscious choices: the game reads responses that you’re not aware are being assessed. It loses a tiny piece of its impact by having plus and minus markers appearing above surrounding characters’ heads after some events, though this does make you aware of how often your actions are being judged, and there are so many occasions where a little action can make a difference that it quickly fades into the background. At the very beginning of the game, for example, a photographer asks you to pose for a picture to help him drum up some more business. It’s easy enough, over in a flash, and off you go. But if you take the opportunity to pull a face just as the shutter closes, you’ve been a bit naughty.

But, importantly, that’s naughty, and not evil: part of Fable II’s fleshing out of the concept is that the personality is now multilayered. This means you can be a fundamentally good character, but an ugly and corrupt one without any charm. And you’ll look like it. “I hope you see some heroes that are magnificent and beautiful – but totally and utterly evil,” says Carter. “Pure in a kind of Aryan ideal way – they look beautiful but scary and will ultimately destroy the world.” Again, however, it’s not all about the big things: while trying to demonstrate how expressions work, Molyneux is pulling a heroic pose in front of a lady and some children gather around to watch. After holding it for a while he messes up his timing: but rather than ‘failing’, the children fall about laughing at the foolish hero. They don’t think he’s failed; they think he’s funny. Molyneux’s temporary clumsiness has put his character on the path to being an entertainer.



“Basically, we’ve added more scales in there,” says Molyneux. “So you can go through and be either pure evil or corrupt evil. There’s wealth and poverty which is really interesting in itself, because if you’ve got great wealth then how do you feel about that? And how do people feel about you? There’s an enormous number of stats that are being analysed – and there are things like people being corrupt and evil, but poor. And what do you call that? We knew it could, but we just didn’t realize that would happen.” At this point he shows the morality curves of 50 testers in the first six hours of the game – they vary wildly, but what’s noticeable is there’s a significant proportion wavering on the evil side. “There’s a lot of potential in morality, but again as a designer I just want people to play and not overthink that stuff – I don’t want this to be the equivalent of an arthouse film where often the enjoyment comes after you’ve watched it. That looking and analysing, I hate that.”